Tattooed "faith-healer" and scam artist Todd Bentley has announced that he's temporarily suspending his ministry because...wait for it...he got busted cheating on his wife with one of his staff. That sounds familiar. Bentley's organization, Fresh Fire Ministries, announced today that "the enemy has found a way into our camp" and that Bentley will be stepping down from his position on the Board of Directors and will be canceling all of his ministry activities for at least the rest of "the season". (Not exactly sure what they mean by that, honestly.) Bentley's thralls have been assured that "there has been no sexual immorality"* but that Bentley "entered into an unhealthy relationship on an emotional level with a female member of his staff". That peculiar choice of wording amuses me a little, because "unhealthy emotional relationships" don't generally result in terrible marital strife and the suspension of a lucrative ministry movement. I'm forced to wonder if they simply don't want to own up to Bentley engaging in extramarital humping.
Child molester Todd Bentley is taking a break from preaching.
The rest of the announcement basically boiled down to "stop asking questions and keep sending money." Weirdly, however, mention is also made of Fresh Fire Ministries' "Supernatural Training Centre". Apparently this is a program through which Bentley and his lieutenants teach other folks all of their magical powers. This is in reference to the "charismatic gifts", aka magical X-Men powers, that Pentecostals claim that Yahweh bestows on the most sycophantic of his followers, but according to the STC these gifts can brought out through spiritual "impartation" by Bentley and his goons for the lowly price of $3,600 tuition, $1,500 for a mission trip, and $450 a month as a dormitory fee. Oh, and a $50 application fee. Bentley claims to have raised almost two dozen people from the dead, so perhaps that's meant to be a bargain price, but considering the cost it should come as no surprise that the application fee includes a financial disclosure form. (Carrying the X-Men joke a little further, the SYC promotional material continually references one's DNA - Divine Nature Activated.)
Luckily for Bentley and disturbingly for the rest of the world, the faithful have tended to have short memories when it comes to this kind of scandal. Precedent indicates that we have every reason to expect Bentley to be back to his huckster ways in no time.
Thanks to reader Jak for bringing this to my attention.
*Except for that little boy Bentley molested when he was a teenager, of course. Jesus gave him a mulligan on that one.
As I've mentioned before, it is a source of civic pride to many Louisville residents that a hospital in our city has performed, to my knowledge, every hand transplant ever in the United States. The current ongoing success story revolves around a fellow named Dave Armstrong, whose right hand was blown off when one of his guns misfired during target practice. As of Saturday, July 12th, Mr. Armstrong now has a functional, if slightly used, cadaver hand attached to his forearm. He's the forth person in the country to receive a hand transplant, and thus far Armstrong and all three of his fellow patients are doing well and still have their transplanted limbs. One of these transplant recipients, Matthew Scott, has had his transplanted limb for almost 9 years now. That's pretty freaking amazing.
I bring this up because I stumbled upon this front page article on Friday night after returning home from a showing of The Dark Knight, and my first thought, corny as it sounds, was something along the lines of "Doctors are real superheroes." (At that point a rainbow cut across the sky and a cartoon deer bounded through the foreground.) After reading through the article and then glancing through the rest of the national news, I made the foolish mistake of opening up the "Metro" section of the paper, which is normally reserved for glurge stories mixed incongruously with crime reports. In sharp contrast to the meaningful, dare I say uplifting, article about Dave Armstrong, the front page of the Metro proudly proclaimed that lunatic faith healer Todd Bentley had infiltrated my town, cleverly sneaking in under cover of Thursday while everyone was distracted by early reviews of Batman, and held a donation-fest revival before quickly moving on.
Bentley is a Canadian Pentecostal who, according to publications from his native country, has had some run-ins with the law for drug crimes and the sexual assault of a young boy, but now, of course, claims to be an utterly new person who has been endowed by the Creator of the Universe with magical X-Men powers that enable him to supernaturally heal anyone without an externally visible affliction. Bentley has been the subject of a recent Nightline report, which is embedded below, and has even run afoul of other religious oddballs, among them Intelligent Design advocate Bill Dembski, who currently "teaches" at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Dembski has a personal ax to grind with Bentley - at one point he and his wife went to a Bentley service in the hopes of having their autistic son healed. According to Dembski their child wasn't even allowed to come near the stage to receive prayers. I wonder why...?
In any event, if there's a polar opposite of legitimate advances in medical science it's money-grubbing charlatan faith-healers. Hopefully this kind of lunacy will eventually be regulated with as much rigor as other false medical claims. (Which honestly aren't regulated with enough rigor themselves.) Some of my more cynical friends have claimed that the victims of these faith healers deserved what they get, but I disagree. Perpetrating this kind of fraud on innocent, trusting people is the very height of callousness. Even if they have been conditioned by their religions to believe bizarre claims with insufficient evidence, the responsibility for any specific act of fraud rests solely on the shoulders of the witch doctor who perpetrated it.
A 16 year-old Oregon boy named Neil Beagley is dead from complications of a treatable urinary tract blockage because he refused to seek medical treatment for the disease. Beagley, a member of Oregon's Followers of Christ church, instead opted to rely on faith-healing to fix the problem. It did not, leaving him to an excruciating death due to organ failures. A simple catheter would have saved his life.
Beagley's parents don't face charges in this particular case because Oregon laws allow children 14 and older to refuse medical treatment for themselves. Now, I believe in the right of adults to refuse medical treatment or even elect to be euthanized if their afflictions are untreatable, but let's think this through a little bit. A 14 year-old kid can't drink, smoke, drive, vote, drop out of school, or legally have sex - If they can't be trusted in these matters, why should they be trusted in matters of their own life and death? The Supreme Court has found that minors do not have the full set of rights as an adult - For example, in the 2007 Morse vs. Frederick case, the Court found that minors do not necessarily enjoy full freedom of speech rights in certain situations. Thus, one may rationally conclude that if minors do not necessarily have a full compliment of rights, it is logical to withhold above all the right to refuse medical treatment. While there is apparently no legitimate way to prosecute Beagley's parents because of Oregon laws, this case should be sufficient cause for the Oregonian legislature to reconsider whether or not children can be trusted to act in their own rational self interest with regards to matters of their own mortality.
Oregon has done quite a bit over the past few years to destroy legal shields by which parents who kill their kids by refusing them treatment for religious or other reason can avoid prosecution. Interestingly, the case Beagley's own cousin, 15-month old Ava Worthington, who died in March from from untreated pneumonia was the first case to be prosecuted under this new set of laws. Worthington's parents intend to use a religious freedom defense in the case, but Oregon laws will make that a tough sell.
For those of you keeping score, the government generally contends that it has a pertinent interest in stopping parents from condemning their children to agonizingly painful deaths due to willful negligence. Religious convictions are not a trump card to parental responsibilities (and homicide laws), no matter how you try and dress them up. To my way of thinking, refusing a child medical treatment in favor of prayer is child abuse on the scale of intentionally starving a child to death.
Child molester Todd Bentley is taking a break from preaching.
